Five reasons why you should never sell another link load balancer.

Looking for Redundancy, Quality of Service, and increased network performance from a single device?

We know your customers want a better network. And we understand – there are limits to using broadband connections for a complicated LAN. But the traditional link balancing solution isn’t necessarily the right solution. Below are five reasons why a Bonded Internet™ solution is preferable (over a Load Balancer) both to you and your clients.

1. Same IP Failover – Fail-Over taken to the next level

A network connection goes down, your client stays up. Sounds like load balancing, right? With Multapplied’s Bonded Internet, you can now offer your customers an advanced fail-over mechanism that will maintain their public IP address. Consider how long a Load-Balancer’s DNS round-robin takes to fail an application off of one connection and on to another. With Bonded InternetTM, the IP address of customer.com does not change if a line goes down. Customers can compute through outages and won’t lose a word on a VoIP call, let alone the session.

2. Real-time monitoring and management of all connections

The trouble with selling a load-balancer is two-fold when it comes to your visibility and customer support. The Load Balancer is a box, and can only manage traffic as it passes through the device. With Bonded InternetTM, the service provider has full visibility of the entire last-mile, so it can trouble-shoot problems outside the LAN, and truly offer the network-as-a-service. Secondly, the customer is almost encouraged to buy an off-net connection – for the ISP providing the service, there is no visibility into that connection, and thus puts your brand at risk. With Bonded InternetTM, off-net connections can also be monitored within the system, giving you better visibility into your customer.

3. LAN-to-Core and LAN-to-LAN Quality of Service

Some Load Balancers – not all – offer a Quality of Service engine as a selling feature. The trouble is that the engine acts simply as a doorman for any traffic exiting the LAN. Bonded InternetTM’s QoS engine acts as a chauffeur. Because Bonded InternetTM is a core-to-LAN system, packet order is maintained beyond the LAN, right to the Core. Last mile hiccups such as Latency and Jitter are avoided in real-time by Bonded InternetTM. What’s more, if there’s suddenly a large volume of high-priority traffic, the “chauffeur” will opt to take a chartered bus to accommodate the flow. The QoS module is entirely dynamic, and priority levels can expand to adapt to fluctuations in traffic volumes.

4. One-Time vs. Recurring Revenue

We know how important revenue is. Especially the kind you sell today and collect over the next 36 months. With a Load Balancer, when the deal is done, so too is your revenue – unless you’re offering financing – which is a whole other head-ache. A Bonded InternetTM deal is a service-deal, meaning you sell it today and you can collect revenue over the course of a contract. Your client remains your client for the length of the contract, giving you ample time to up-sell onto other services and increase your share of their communications budget.

5. Open Architecture – a Swiss Army Knife Approach

Adding a load balancer to your client’s LAN simply increases the number of boxes their IT staff has to manage. With Bonded InternetTM, not only is the system hardware agnostic, but the open architecture allows partners to put multiple value-add services on to the Bonded InternetTM CPE. Firewall? DNS? Intrusion Prevention and/or Detection? Bandwidth Reporting? – put them all on the Bonded InternetTM CPE and increase your revenue per customer and your company ‘stickiness’.

We’re confident you’ll wonder why you ever sold a Load Balancer in the first place – give us a call, we’d be happy to set up a live demonstration and help you understand the technical and business opportunities related to Bonded Internet.